Who Ruined the Humanities?

Of course it's important to read the great poets and novelists. But not in a university classroom, where literature has been turned into a bland, soulless competition for grades and status.

Fewer and fewer undergraduates are majoring in the humanities, and critic Lee Siegel couldn't be happier. As he tells WSJ's Gary Rosen, great poetry and novels are meant to be experienced in private and alone, away from the competitive pressures of the classroom.

By

Lee Siegel

July 12, 2013 7:44 p.m. ET

You've probably heard the baleful reports. The number of college students majoring in the humanities is plummeting, according to a big study released last month by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The news has provoked a flood of high-minded essays deploring the development as a symptom and portent of American decline.

But there is another way to look at this supposed revelation (the number of humanities majors has actually been falling since the 1970s).

The bright side is this: The destruction of the humanities by the humanities is, finally, coming to a halt. No more will literature, as part of an academic curriculum, extinguish the incandescence of literature. No longer will the reading of, say, "King Lear" or D.H. Lawrence's "Women in Love" result in the flattening of these transfiguring encounters into just two more elements in an undergraduate career—the onerous stuff of multiple-choice quizzes, exam essays and homework assignments.

The disheartening fact is that for every college professor who made Shakespeare or Lawrence come alive for the lucky few—the British scholar Frank Kermode kindled Shakespeare into an eternal flame in my head—there were countless others who made the reading of literary masterpieces seem like two hours in the periodontist's chair. In their numbing hands, the term "humanities" became code for "and you don't even have to show up to get an A."

When people wax plaintive about the fate of the humanities, they talk, in particular, about the slow extinction of English majors. Never mind that the preponderance of English majors go into other fields, such as law or advertising, and that students who don't major in English can still take literature courses. In the current alarming view, large numbers of people devoting four years mostly to studying novels, poems and plays are all that stand between us and sociocultural nightfall.

The remarkably insignificant fact that, a half-century ago, 14% of the undergraduate population majored in the humanities (mostly in literature, but also in art, philosophy, history, classics and religion) as opposed to 7% today has given rise to grave reflections on the nature and purpose of an education in the liberal arts.

Such ruminations always come to the same conclusion: We are told that the lack of a formal education, mostly in literature, leads to numerous pernicious personal conditions, such as the inability to think critically, to write clearly, to empathize with other people, to be curious about other people and places, to engage with great literature after graduation, to recognize truth, beauty and goodness.

These solemn anxieties are grand, lofty, civic-minded, admirably virtuous and virtuously admirable. They are also a sentimental fantasy.

The college teaching of literature is a relatively recent phenomenon. Literature did not even become part of the university curriculum until the end of the 19th century. Before that, what came to be called the humanities consisted of learning Greek and Latin, while the Bible was studied in church as the necessary other half of a full education. No one ever thought of teaching novels, stories, poems or plays in a formal course of study. They were part of the leisure of everyday life.

With the waning of religious authority, the humanities were born as a means of taking up the slack. Chaucer, Milton and Shakespeare were now put in the service of ministering truth to souls parched for higher meaning. Anything more contemporary than Shakespeare, however, was seldom part of the curriculum. (As an undergraduate at Columbia, it delighted me no end to discover that the English department listed the telephone number of the visiting professor each year in the Manhattan White Pages under the name "Milton S. Chaucer." Looking the number up, as I often did, enchanted me.)

The teaching of literature came into its own early in the 20th century, with the formation of literature departments. For years, these consisted mostly of philologists who examined etymology and the history of a text. It was only after World War II that the study of literature as a type of wisdom, relevant to actual, contemporary life, put down widespread institutional roots.

In a sense, the story of teaching literature as a profession is a story of war. Soldiers returning home in 1945 yearned to make sense of their lives after the carnage they had witnessed and survived. The GI Bill and an abundant economy afforded them the opportunity and the time to do so. In that moment, teaching literature as an investigation of life's enigmas struck a deep collective chord. Majoring in English hit its zenith, yet it was this very popularity of literature in the university that spelled its doom, as tendentious pedants of various stripes accelerated the academicization of literary art.

In contrast to the effects of World War II, the purposeless bloodshed of the Vietnam War made all authority suspect. That was when teaching literature acquired an especially intense ideological fervor, when university radicals started their long (and fruitless) march through academic institutions armed with that fig leaf for mediocrity known as "theory." And that was when majoring in English began its slow decline. The rest is today's news.

Only a knave would applaud the falling-off in the formal study of books that cultivate empathy, curiosity, aesthetic taste and moral refinement. But the academic study of literature leads to nothing of the sort.

More than 50 years ago, the critic and professor Lionel Trilling expressed his frustration with presenting imaginative writing in the classroom in an essay titled "On the Teaching of Modern Literature." It was published in 1961, a time when majoring in English was in its heyday.

Trilling observed that the modernist literature he had on his syllabus—Eliot, Yeats, Lawrence, Proust, Kafka, Mann, Gide—"asks every question that is forbidden in polite society. It asks us if we are content with our marriages, with our family lives, with our professional lives, with our friends." He then rolled his eyes at professorial efforts to convey the character of such outlaw works to undergraduates, mocking a typical exam question for his course: "Compare Yeats, Gide, Lawrence, and Eliot in the use which they make of the theme of sexuality to criticize the deficiencies of modern culture. Support your statement by specific references to the work of each author. [Time: One hour.]'"

Trilling was exasperated by the absurdity of teaching morally subversive modernist works in the morally conventional precincts of a university, to the point where he somewhat hysterically exaggerated what he called the "force and terror" of modernist literature (there is terror in Syria, not in Gide). But he was, after all, a college teacher, and he was not able to see that the classroom also ruins literature's joys, as well as trivializing its jolting dissents.

Literature changed my life long before I began to study it in college and then, in a hapless trance, in graduate school. Born into modest circumstances, I plunged with wonder into the turbulent emotions of Julien Sorel, the young romantic striver of Stendhal's "The Red and the Black." My parents might have fought as their marital troubles crashed into divorce, but Chekhov's stories sustained me with words that captured my sadness, and Keats's language filled me with a beauty that repelled the forces that were making me sad.

ENLARGE

John Keats, left, and William Shakespeare
Getty Images

Books took me far from myself into experiences that had nothing to do with my life, yet spoke to my life. Reading Homer's "Iliad," I could feel the uncanny power of recognizing the emotional universe of radically alien people. Yeats gave me a special language for a desire that defined me even as I had never known it was mine: "And pluck till time and times are done/The silver apples of the moon/The golden apples of the sun."

But once in the college classroom, this precious, alternate life inside me got thrown back into that dimension of my existence that vexed or bored me. Homer, Chekhov and Yeats were reduced to right and wrong answers, clear-cut themes, a welter of clever and more clever interpretations. Books that transformed the facts were taught like science and social science and themselves reduced to mere facts. Novels, poems and plays that had been fonts of empathy, and incitements to curiosity, were now occasions of drudgery and toil.

Every other academic subject requires specialized knowledge and a mastery of skills and methods. Literature requires only that you be human. It does not have to be taught any more than dreaming has to be taught. Why does Hector's infant son, Astyanax, cry when he sees his father put on his helmet? All you need to understand that is a heart.

So you see, I am not making a brief against reading the classics of Western literature. Far from it. I am against taking these startling epiphanies of the irrational, unspoken, unthought-of side of human life into the college classroom and turning them into the bland exercises in competition, hierarchy and information-accumulation that are these works' mortal enemies.

The notion that great literature can help you with reading and thinking clearly is also a chimera. One page of Henry James's clotted involutions or D.H. Lawrence's throbbing verbal repetitions will disabuse you of any conception of literature's value as a rhetorical model. Rather, the literary masterworks of Western civilization demonstrate the limitations of so-called clear-thinking. They present their meanings in patchwork-clouds of associations, intuitions, impressions. There are sonnets by Shakespeare that no living person can understand. The capacity to transfix you with their language while hiding their meaning in folds of mind-altering imagery is their rare quality.

The literary classics are a haven for that part of us that broods over mortal bewilderments, over suffering and death and fleeting happiness. They are a refuge for our secret self that wishes to contemplate the precious singularity of our physical world, that seeks out the expression of feelings too prismatic for rational articulation. They are places of quiet, useless stillness in a world that despises any activity that is not profitable or productive.

Literary art's sudden, startling truth and beauty make us feel, in the most solitary part of us, that we are not alone, and that there are meanings that cannot be bought, sold or traded, that do not decay and die. This socially and economically worthless experience is called transcendence, and you cannot assign a paper, or a grade, or an academic rank, on that. Literature is too sacred to be taught. It needs only to be read.

ENLARGE

Make a whale-ship—or a tree—your Yale and your Harvard.
Gallery Stock

At the present moment, we are experiencing the rise of new digital pleasures and distractions, the expansion of a mostly visual culture that races far ahead of the imagination, the ubiquity of social networks that redefine the pure solitude once required for reading a demanding book. And in this time of rapid changes in the workplace, life's great mysteries seem more economic than existential. A digital environment also stresses quantitative thinking, and perhaps that helps explain why the most exciting cultural advances are now in science and medicine.

It is hardly a surprise that in this atmosphere, college students choose to major in fields that are most relevant to the life around them. What a blessing that is on literature. Slipping out from behind ivied prison doors, where they have been forced to labor as evaluative "texts," the great thoughts and feelings made permanent by art can resume their rightful place as a unique phase of ordinary experience.

Anyway, we have all been sufficiently sparked and stoked by literature to make it part of our destiny by the time we graduate high school. If there is any hand-wringing to do, it should be over the disappearance of what used to be a staple of every high-school education: the literature survey course, where books were not academically taught but intimately introduced—an experience impervious to inane commentary and sterile testing. Restore and strengthen that ground-shifting encounter and the newly graduated pilgrims will continue to read and seek out the transfiguring literary works of the past the way they will be drawn to love.

And just as we do not need to know about biology and physiology in order to love and to be loved, we do not need to know about, for example, Homer's rhetoric or historical context in order to enter into Odysseus's journey of wandering, rebirth and homecoming. The old books will speak to the oldest part of us. Young people will read them when they are touched by inexpressible yearnings the way they will eat when they are hungry. If they want to. Some of these pitiable non-humanities majors might not be interested in literature at all. They might have to settle for searching for a cure for cancer, and things like that.

In "Moby-Dick," Melville's narrator, Ishmael, declares that "a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard." Soon, if all goes well and literature at last disappears from the undergraduate curriculum—my fingers are crossed—increasing numbers of people will be able to say that reading the literary masterworks of the past outside the college classroom, simply in the course of living, was, in fact, their college classroom.

Mr. Siegel is the author of four books, most recently, "Are You Serious: How to Be True and Get Real in the Age of Silly."

If you do away with literature and the humanities in college, then people like me probably won't read them. I've never been much of a novel reader, prefering non-fiction, including biographies, history, business, poliitics, and so on. If I read a work of fiction, it will probably be a mystery by Agatha Christie or a spy thriller by Tom Clancy.

I've read some of the great works of literature, because I read them in high school and college classes, including The Odyssey, The Illiad, Dante's Inferno, Candide, and Faust. In fact, one of my favorite lines comes from Crime and Punishment, "Man gets used to everything, the scoundrel." I read that novel while taking a 200-level English class with Prof. Bert Hornbeck at the University of Michigan.

Why take literature and humanites? Because if the emphasis on math and science continues, the quality of writing in the work place will decline. I've been told by many co-workers and friends that I have a nice style of writing. I llike to think that came about from reading great works literature and writing about them, and not from reading the dry textbooks in my major, economics.

I feel sorry for people who waste their college years on vocational education, as well as those who are so intimidated by books that they write articles like this one. Books are not just one thing. They can be many things, to many people. But the idea that subjecting them to critical analysis or theory somehow displaces "enjoyment," is just thinly veiled anti-intellectual masquerading as a higher purpose. "I don't try to "understand" a book, I just enjoy it." is fine, but ultimately restrictive.

First, the type of learning discussed is not supposed to take place in university because the latter is meant for research and specialization. The humanities are learned in secondary and liberal colleges as well as part of continuing education and exposure to cultural institutions, including museums, libraries, art galleries, opera houses, theater groups, etc.

Second, the reason why fewer people major in the humanities is because people in general are reading less, and the reason for that is the proliferation of commercial mass entertainment and in general the presence of a consumer spending society. It also doesn't help when in various places funding for cultural institutions are cut.

Third, the reason why there are grades in school is because society in general, including not just potential employers but parents who pay for tuition, require them.

Another 1000 years of scholarly research on Shakesphere and Aristotle will achieve nothing but an endless circular discussion of a stagnant subject. Another 50 years of scholarly research in the hard sciences will change the world.

Enjoyable essay but the argument is a bit weak. The author states that he does not want literature taken "into the college classroom and turning them into the bland exercises in competition, hierarchy and information-accumulation that are these works' mortal enemies." But that is an argument against the process of teaching and leaning in general, not just of literature. One could say the same of mathematics or any other major. In fact, this is exactly as I recall my personal experience with university teaching of various math and economics courses. It was only as I grew older and wiser that I learned the beauty of both of these beyond the rote learning rituals I had mastered in college. But was the process necessary? Of course. Learning is continuous, it does not have a start point and end point of four years time.

The so-called "Humanities" encompass more than just English Literature. They have long been the haven of those who wanted to know more and more about less and less. They still are the platinum ticket to academic snobbery, but sadly, they aren't useful for much of anything else. As the author points out, you can probably learn and enjoy more by reading the works themselves.

What is killing the Humanities, is that, save teaching, you cannot get a government job "doing" Humanities. All of those mealtickets go to '_______ Studies' programs and social research for which the government will spend like a drunken sailor.

Also, today's bankable knowledge is highly specialized knowledge. There is a lot of this specialized knowledge, and it must be gotten quickly. How many years can the person of average means spend as a dilettante at $50k per year?

The thinking person could, however, benefit greatly by a Humanities education in retirement.

In my case, I never "took" art history in college. I am now pursuing this exciting subject via online classes and through the development of mostly online relationships with fellow travelers. I could see this happening with the canon for those who missed it. Robert

I hope someone else among all the comments I haven't read will take on the basic, sentimental errors of the premise here: "No one ever thought of teaching novels, stories, poems or plays in a formal course of study. They were part of the leisure of everyday life." How does Mr. Siegel think all that Greek and Latin (Latin longer than Greek, in western European culture) was being taught for the last thousand years and more? It's true that teaching contemporary literature was an innovation of the late nineteenth century, which bloomed in the 1950s and 60s (along with teaching contemporary philosophy, also a no-no until the 20th cent., and art history, and a number of other things that weren't part of the university "major" until the last century). But teaching "rhetoric" meant teaching literature, going back to Quintillian and Cicero; and you don't get poets like Chaucer or Shakespeare, much less Milton, without a steady and heavy focus on teaching all sorts of literature. We all know (well, maybe Mr. Siegel doesn't), that Milton was sent down for fighting his tutor at university; but what Milton was learning there was certainly part of the immense learning in ancient literatures that shows up in his poetry. University authorities don't always approve of what teachers teach, of course; but that's not news either. In the 1370s, when Chaucer was just coming into his own as a poet, the chancellor of the university of Oxford issued a warning to grammar school teachers that they should stop doing close exposition of Ovid's "Ars amatoria" in their lessons as well as the medieval Latin play called "Pamphilus" (which has a seduction or rape at its center). Presumably that warning means they were doing a lot of that kind of teaching at the grammar school level. And of course at university from well before then up to the 19th century Ovid was regularly taught. For most of that time, theology was the queen of the sciences. I'd say it was replaced in that role by science, not by literature, which was always the minor cousin in the academic family. But literature was certainly very much there, and the idea that teaching it was some innovation of the 1970s that, thankfully, is disappearing at last to leave people free to go back to their languid "leisured" reading of poetry (or whatever Romantic notion Mr. Siegel has) is just uninformed. The lawyers, physicians, theologians, and other people of high and sometimes (but not often enough) low rank and all sorts of others who passed through university from the 12th century through to the present have always been taught literature in many forms, poorly or very well, and with or without historical perspective on that tradition.

Mr. Siegel is missing the point of studying literature in college. I teach ancient Greek tragedy -- not because I want the students to enjoy these great plays, which they could do on their own, but because I can help them see the connections between early theater and its social and political context. If my students learn about the way Athenian playwrights reacted to the problems of early democracy, they will be better able to understand the way contemporary artists communicate with the problems and opportunities of our political system. They will become better readers of art and critics of subtle arguments.

I teach the ancient Greek language, not only so that my students will be able to read foundational works in every field, but also so that they will be able to understand language in general and English in particular. They go on to read Homer, not only for the joy of its beauty, but for what it can tell us about early iron age civilization and how it constructed its values. They read Herodotus and Thucydides, not to learn the people and events that shaped Greek history (for which Wikipedia or a textbook would be enough), but to understand how the course of human events is shaped; and I help them recognize the rhetorical and ideological sneakinesses that swayed (and still sway) public opinion in destructive directions.

In recent months I have seen a culture-of-education war developing between STEM fields and the Humanities. Allies of the Humanities have been quaint in their defense of the "life enriching" power of literature. What we must remind everyone is that study of the Humanities also makes you better at whatever you do: scientists and engineers need to be able to understand complicated systems of thought, too. The best and most successful scientists are avid readers. The most successful job applicants write cover letters without basic errors of logic or short-sighted goals.

No, it's not. At best, this is an assumption. Really, what value does reading "the greats" have that cannot be obtained elsewhere?

Dicken's will drive some to HATE reading. Shakespeare, too! Many of those forced to read these so-called "greats" (most of whom are just prior generation WASPs) at a young age will NEVER pick up a book again, never want to read anything again. These old folks do NOT speak to today's young people. They are a waste of time and a threat to a good education.

The humanities education that was so important in another era has no relevance in the current world. None. It was an artiface of the 19th century that lived well in to the 20th, but is completely irrelevant today. College is no longer just a time for the landed gentry's sons to become schooled and interesting so they can successfully inherit grandpapa's money. It's a transition in to a career... and there's way too much to cover in engineering, computer science, medicine, law or finance to waste good time on long dead theories and authors.

Read them on the weekend and at night. They should be a part of your culture of self and home; not a 4 or 6 or 10 year educational preoccupation. Culture is King but education has to be practical and about jobs, return on investment and utility. A Pretty Happy Dude degree in Shakespeare is unnecessary.

Mr. Siegel seems to believe that the humanities rest on one's personal readings of some literature. And, of course, with that presupposition such literature reading can be done alone. Thus more room will be left at the Universities for practical things like memorizing facts and being told what to think about stuff (my paraphrase).

I would like to bring to light a number of reasons why the humanities and humanistic studies must stay with us as a society or we will become small minded myopic little people.

The humanities are more than just some literature from the past. They derive from a rich tradition spanning thousands of years, numerous cultures and civilizations as they ponder some of life's perennial questions: what is the meaning of life, when does life begin, how do human-beings live together, what is the purpose of life, how shall we order a state, when is it lawful to go to war, is there love, why is there evil in the world...etc.

Classically the tradition was called the Liberal Arts encompassing how these questions relate to all of human existence. Hence humanists often seek answers from history, philosophy, theology, political theory, literature, poetry and the sciences. A renaissance in the cross-disciplinary approach of the Humanities has reemerged in recent times as Interdisciplinary Studies.

Those who have been ruined by modern education will do what Mr. Seigel has done: they point out that modern times are different, we have fancy stuff and school is just for learning facts. Right? Sorry Mr. Seigel people are not commodities to be mass produced as tires through an educational system that merely downloads information. The process kills our humanity. Where is the heart. Where is the debate? Where is the community of learning as we explore life's ultimate questions. There is none – we have all become products. At least Mr. Seigel is excited about that. I'm not.

If anything, the humanities and the Liberal Arts traditions give us debates and questions. In a world where money and statistics determine wars and cost analysis determines how one can use slave labor in sweat-shops – having humanists around trained in the great questions of civilizations, their philosophies, histories, ethics and literature – can serve as buffers against the tied of injustice and com-modification of people in our modern contexts.

Lastly, for those still unconvinced, tell the protestors in the middle East debates about democracy's social contract – that such debates are best left to personal readings of Roussoue or Wolstonecraft or Locke -- or people in Texas human life or ownership of one's body are unimportant questions. You would be silly if you did. So why on earth would you squelch Plato, Aristotle, Philo, Augustine, Averroes, Jesus, Rousseau, Kant, Washington, Muhammad, Wollstonecraft, Nietzsche, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Jane Austin and Foucault from the debate (just to name a few).

In Mr. Seigel's small world its the mechanistic money makers that rule the day at the University. I, for one, will not join in the praises of such a transition.

Best,

John (PhD Candidate in Interdisciplinarity at Union Institute & University and Dean of Secondary Academics for the Connection School of Houston)

Henry Luce, who started Time magazine and the Time, Inc., empire, was schooled in a classical education. Prior to Time, journalism was a rather bland affair, which explains why The New York Times was called "The Gray Lady". Luce, wanting to grab the attention of the new middle class emerging in the 1920, did so not only by condensing the news but enlivening the writing style. His inspiration for livelier reporting? Homer's Iliad. Instead of "wine-dark sea" or "rosy-fingered dawn", Luce developed such descriptive compound adjectives as "smooth-talking" salesman, "double-chinned" Senator, and "bleary-eyed" revelers. In short, education needs to get back to the basics.

Well, when tuition was $3000 or less per year, majoring in Literature was an affordable luxury. But, at $50,000 per year why would you?

You can buy more books than you could read at that price. Plus, throw in plane tickets to London to watch a play at the Globe, where you'll learn that Will wanted his plays to be SEEN rather than read. Add in stays in Paris and Rome (or any other destination you'd like) and you'll end up far more educated than what the tuition will buy.

What confounds me is how English majors tend to approach the job market as though they can talk their way into any profession. I think there is something to be said for those who have a deep interest in a subject and dedicate their lives to it. It doesn't seem fair to award an English major with a job in multiple professions simply because (as I've observed) they can schmooze their way in, having great interview skills. Schmoozing, imo, is not a useful skill in life but it seems to be the way many people make it.

Though students read classics in classroom for pass the examination ,some are definitely read passionately,only school and colleges they learned importance of classics.I don't think if classics not in curriculum their sale is possible Humanities was not ruined by school or collages but our speed commercialization killed the humanities.When life is so struggling for moneymaking naturally people have no leisure time to read classics,Another thing is there more substitute for entertainment people naturally turn to effortless cinema, T.V. and are neglecting serious novels and other classics books.For reading classics you must have stamina and passion only few readers turn to classics.

Fall, 1975. A warm October day in my room at the U. of Illinois, when I was still young enough to allow an afternoon to linger. Berlioz's "Romeo & Juliette" on the radio, the first time I'd ever heard it in its entirety, and me on the couch, working thru "A Midsummer Night's Dream" for my "Shakespeare on Film" class. Sublime music, with rhyme and meter to match. A memory I'll carry with me forever.

Literature is essential for children to learn about what *could be*, to become thoughtful about people's motivations--others and their own. Literature, taught well during the elementary and middle school years, can be a powerful means of simultaneously shaping children's very being, and improving their language and thinking skills.

"Reading great literature gives children the opportunity to enter exciting worlds, to meet heroic characters, and to consider what could be. While studying the classics of yesterday and today, students not only improve their thinking and communication skills, but also learn important moral lessons, lessons they can use to guide their lives. Our students learn about independence from To Kill a Mockingbird, integrity from Antigone, and heroic perseverance from The Miracle Worker."

It is more than a shame that literature, taught this way, has disappeared from K-12 classrooms: it's a disaster, and one key factor behind the lack of ability of many students today to dream, and to think.

I studied English at the University of Maryland and graduated in 1998 as an "older student." I was 49. The bulk of my English Profs were amazing and delightful, however there is one that sticks in my memory as being completely obtuse! If your theories, thoughts and interpretations did not match his, then you were wrong. Thankfully, he was the only one that I had a hard time tolerating. My love of literature started with my 10th grade HS English teacher and was cemented by my 12th grade Advanced English teacher. I am forever thankful to them.

The best time to engage children with literature is when they are young. As part of their home school curriculum, my children already are familiar with Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Alexander Dumas. We discuss the characters and their actions, even though I am not "formally educated" in classical literature. The result is that my children spend far more time reading books than watching television. They also learn French, which is wonderful for developing their vocabulary. I don't see why we wait to challenge our young people to appreciate the humanities until they are old enough to go to college. We should start at least in high school if not in the lower grades.

I graduated from the English department at George Mason University in 2009. Now four years later, I'm working with a company (ID.me) that this publication has selected to compete for the title of Startup of the Year. (wsj.com/soty)

Studying English should not be abandoned. It has been invaluable to me in the career and life choices I have made. Whether or not English students find their studies to be useful after graduation is entirely up to them. If it doesn't work for some, the program isn't to blame.

My parents instilled in me a love for reading at an early age. My first real book was "David Copperfield" by Charles Dickens, and I loved to read the literary classics for pleasure. However, In high school I found Dickens a chore; in college, I dreaded Thursday afternoons when the required literature course dissected Hemingway and Fitzgerald to the point of non-recognition. It wasn't until later - after deciding to major in Economics and eventually become a tax attorney when those authors came alive once again. I found myself reaching for those texts - willing to give them "another try," and loving every minute of the experience. The difference was that reading these books was on my own terms (plus the invisible benefit of added maturity) and at my own pace. Kudos to the author for reducing into text the thoughts I have harbored for many years.

I too had discovered the joys, even the addictive qualities, of literature long before college. My first college lit course, under the guidance of the incomparable Prof. Raban of Queens College in 1960, was a great re-introduction to the pleasures of reading - with greater depth. Subsequent literature courses were mixed - some as bad as this article suggests. None of these could match just sitting under a tree and reading my heart out, but in part that was because we were reading against the clock - so many books but only 15 weeks. A bit worse was that as my studies in history and philosophy took center stage, I lost the will to read literature and eventually even the joy of reading. The humanities became my work, and it was hard and demanding work with little time or even desire for 'fun'.

Nonetheless I recently looked at a list of the hundred most important books of the century - I am not going to quarrel about whether the list got it right or not - and found to my chagrin that most of the books on that list that I had actually read - for better or worse - I had read in high school or college literature courses.

So I think this article poses a false choice. Pleasure reading is - well - the most pleasurable. School reading may not be pleasurable but it is instructive and adds a depth dimension one could otherwise gain only from reading in criticism and the history of literature - and what casual pleasure reader is going to go there?

The decline in majors has nothing to do with any of this. In the early 1960s when I was in college the humanities major was an occupational major no less than commerce or agriculture or engineering. College enrollments were rapidly expanding and the need for professors in every field great. Today only a fool would major in humanities subjects hoping for a career in scholarship and teaching. I don't know whether this is to be deplored or not - enough professors are enough - but it may mean that fewer young people become educated in any but the most trivial sense. That can't be good.

"No longer will the reading of, say, "King Lear" or D.H. Lawrence's "Women in Love" result in the flattening of these transfiguring encounters into just two more elements in an undergraduate career—the onerous stuff of multiple-choice quizzes...."

Multiple-choice quizzes? On "King Lear" and "Women in Love"? Where on earth did Mr.Siegel go to college?

As James Taranto pointed out in a previous column, a much larger fraction of the population is now going to college than in the 1970s, The actual NUMBER of all 18 to 25 year olds majoring in the humanities has gone up since the 1970. The PERCENTAGE of all 18 to 25 year olds majoring in the humanities has only dropped about 20% since the 1970s- possibly due to increases in tuition drastically outstripping the average inflation rate.

I think the biggest reason for this is that our society has lost a lot of quality in its education. There was a day where anyone with a 3rd grade education could read a newspaper, and any one who finished middle school was well versed on western history. Additionally, because of our national fear of offending someone most of the people I know in my age category aren't willing and/or aren't able to discuss complex philosophical, political, or religious concepts and beliefs without becoming heated and defensive.

I was home schooled and lost out on sports and social experiences so my kids will attend a public school, but I plan on using some of the tools I was given to push them farther than their peers.

On this article, the comments say that studying history, political science, economics, philosophy, etc are a waste of time and that "education has to be practical and about jobs, return on investment and utility.".

Lee Siegel argues that he didn't need college to show him how to appreciate literature. Perhaps. But such people are rare. Novels and poems are constructed artifacts, and it helps enormously to have someone show you how the thing was made. The more you understand the mechanics, the more you can see and appreciate the art.

The irony, of course, is that Siegel understands the mechanics of essay-writing backwards and forwards. That makes it easy for him to say that literature requires no specialized knowledge beyond being human. Then again, the "haves" never understand why the "have-nots" have problems.

Nor is the damage confined to literature. What novelists and poets really do is deploy language and culture. Any really persuasive document -- a good legal brief, say, or a business plan -- relies on similar tricks. People who read Dickens write a lot better than those who don't.

The good news is that the tricks can be learned. So let's not let universities off the hook. Sure college is mostly about teaching students mechanics. So what? Four years would be cheap at the price.

"Another 1000 years of scholarly research on Shakesphere and Aristotle will achieve nothing but an endless circular discussion of a stagnant subject." I don't disagree (and I'm one of "those English Lit majors", though quite far removed).

"Another 50 years of scholarly research in the hard sciences will change the world." How?

A great lady and her daughter and I lived together in the mid-1970's. The daughter was 10 when she began reading The Hobbit --- and within 7 or 8 months she had read that plus the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Those 4 books, when run through the magnificent and beautifully creative mind of that glorious young child, gave us 7 or 8 months of discussions and family times. It was precious beyond belief.

It is wonderful to watch the mind of a child come to life --- and reading those 4 books was one of the stimuli that worked that magic in her.

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